Sex Predator

Dianna Strawder had just stepped out of the shower in the early-morning darkness in July 2006 when her phone rang. It was the roommate of her fiancé, Todd West. “Todd is in jail,” he said. All Dianna could sputter out was “What the hell?”

Her head spinning, Dianna couldn’t imagine what her sweet, gentle Todd—the man who surprised her on Sunday mornings with Spanish omelets and cried when his cats were sick—had done. But she didn’t have time to wonder; she had to get to her job as a medical technician at Loganville Dialysis Center, outside Atlanta, where she would spend the day tending to dialysis patients, hooking them up to the whooshing machines that kept them alive. As she drove to work through the predawn streets, she dialed the Harris County jail and asked the woman at the intake desk what was going on.

“You don’t know anything?” the woman said.

“No,” Dianna replied.

“Oh, honey,” the woman said, “I am so sorry.”

What the woman told her next made Dianna’s hands and knees tremble so hard she had to pull over to the side of the road. Todd had been arrested for trying to solicit sex from a decoy disguised as an underage girl. And Dianna, a 34-year-old divorced mother of two adolescent daughters, was about to endure the private agonies behind what has become a very public form of entertainment.

Her fiancé, she learned, had been caught in a sting orchestrated by the popular Dateline: To Catch a Predator series. In the past three years, with the help of an organization called Perverted Justice—a vigilante Internet group whose volunteers pose as children to flush out potential sex offenders—Dateline has shown on national television the capture of more than 263 men, many of whom were seeking sex with minors. The stings follow a pattern: A man trolling online for sex exchanges lurid messages with a pseudo-youngster, expressing his interest in hooking up with, for example, a 14-year-old virgin. The decoy then tells the man her parents are away and invites him “home”—to a house outfitted with hidden cameras. When the man arrives, Dateline and the police pounce.

Viewers have the satisfaction of seeing these men—who have included public officials, schoolteachers and a rabbi—hauled away, sometimes in handcuffs. But what isn’t often shown is the grief and humiliation of those closest to the predators, particularly their wives and girlfriends. And until Dianna Strawder decided to talk to Glamour, none of these women had ever spoken to a national magazine.

In the aftermath of the Dateline sting, Dianna Strawder has had to wrestle with some disturbing questions. She had to ask herself: Who is this man I said I’d marry? Have I done my daughters irreparable harm? And how will I put our lives back together?

A few days after Todd’s arrest, Todd’s roommate and Dianna made the drive to the Harris County jail. Furious and confused, Dianna had had just one brief phone conversation with her fiancé since the bust. She’d had time to ask only if he was OK and had no details of what he’d done. As they traveled, the roommate said that a few weeks earlier he and Todd had watched an episode of Dateline: To Catch a Predator. The roommate had commented, “I can’t believe the freaking idiots who do this kind of thing.” He said Todd had nodded his head in agreement.

Their route took them along Interstate 85, the same highway Todd had driven on the way to his planned hookup. As each mile passed, Dianna’s anger mounted. Two hours into their trip, near the exit for the decoy house Todd had visited, she finally exploded. “He came all this way!” she exclaimed.

At the jail Dianna stared at Todd through an acrylic window scratched with the words “bitch” and “scumbag.” With the visitor’s phone held tightly in her hand, she asked him the question that had been gnawing at her: “How old did she say she was?” At first Todd insisted he’d thought the girl he’d met in an online chat room was 18. Then, she says, he hung his head in shame. “Fourteen,” he admitted, his voice cracking. Dianna stood up, hurled the phone at the window and stalked out of his sight without saying another word.

On the drive home, Dianna sobbed. Until a few days earlier, she’d trusted Todd more than anyone else in the world. A talented amateur artist who managed a costume shop, he’d always been wonderful with her children. They’d met a little more than a year earlier while standing in line at a Starbucks. “I complimented his boots, and before I knew it, we’d been talking for two hours,” she says. “He called a few days later, and we were pretty much together after that.” Todd made her feel nurtured, something she’d rarely experienced with a man. “I thought Todd was my soulmate. Getting this news—it was like somebody died.”

Now she wasn’t sure what to do. Above all was the question of her daughters’ safety and well-being; Dianna had custody of her children, and Todd was around the apartment a lot when the girls, ages 11 and 13, were there. There was also the matter of her dignity; Todd had cheated on her in the most humiliating way possible. “I immediately thought about leaving him. I’d decide to do it, and then I’d get sick to my stomach,” she says.

Over the next few days, the image of Todd sitting in jail played in her head. But another memory kept surfacing too. When Dianna was 15, she’d been sexually molested by an older man. She’d told her mother, who had confronted the abuser, but charges were never pressed. Dianna couldn’t accept that Todd was like this man. “I knew what a sex offender looked like. Todd seemed like the furthest thing from that,” she says. “I wasn’t OK with what he did, but I wasn’t OK with him staying in jail, either.”

Dianna decided she’d gather the $7,000 to bail Todd out—but not without trepidation. “I loved Todd, but I wasn’t sure about my decision,” she says. “I kept asking myself, Am I a lunatic for putting this man near my children?”

While Todd waited in jail, Dianna kept a low profile; outside of Todd’s family, the only people who knew what had happened were a few trusted friends. She didn’t initially tell her daughters, but later that week, when she picked them up from their father’s house, she had to face a question from 13-year-old Rachel. Why, she asked, hadn’t Todd been around?

“Todd is in trouble, baby,” Dianna replied. “He did a bad thing. He went to visit a girl your age for an indecent purpose.”

Rachel fell silent, then asked, “What’s that?”

Dianna carefully explained and told her daughters that though she wasn’t sure about the future of the relationship, she was going to get Todd out of jail and take him to his home. As Jessica and Rachel sat quietly in the back of the car, it dawned on Dianna how much Todd’s arrest would affect them. Her thoughts turned to Dateline; their lives would change dramatically when the episode aired in a few months. “The whole world was going to think my girls had a creep for a stepdad. They were going to go to school with that on their shoulders every day,” Dianna recalls. Suddenly Rachel broke the silence. “Please don’t leave Todd,” she pleaded. “You love him, and we love him.”

The next night, Dianna posted Todd’s bail.

“Thank you,” Todd whispered when she arrived. He looked cowed and broken. On the drive to Todd’s apartment, Dianna listened to his side of the story. He told her he’d started chatting online with the girl because he was scared of getting married. He hadn’t believed she was 14—her language had been too sophisticated, and when he saw her in person, he’d sized her up as being of legal age. (He was right; Dateline’s decoys are always 18 or older.) Todd knew he’d made a stupid mistake, he said, but it wasn’t anything twisted. He would never, ever do anything bad to a child.

Then Todd told her something that gave her hope: When he’d set out to meet the girl, he said, he’d had second thoughts and turned around. As his car headed in the other direction on the highway, the girl called his cell phone and coaxed him back. Dianna softened. He’d tried to do the right thing, she told herself. Maybe he was the man she’d fallen in love with after all. (When Glamour asked Perverted Justice about Todd’s claim that the decoy lured him back, a spokesperson said, “A decoy will often call the suspect to ensure he’s not lost on the way to the home.” The organization also said, “That’s what [predators] do, they blame everyone but themselves. It comes with the territory of dealing with people who are, at base, uncaring, self-serving individuals more concerned with f—king kids than being decent human beings.”)

Dianna felt she knew something about mistakes and redemption. A few years earlier she’d gotten hooked on crystal meth. In 2003 she left her girls with their father while she recovered in rehab. “I’ve done some rotten things. I’ve had to ask forgiveness from people—and they’ve given it,” she says. “I believe that people should be able to redeem themselves.”

Not everyone felt so generous toward Todd. Friends advised Dianna to leave him, saying that a criminal shouldn’t be around her children. Her friend Joe (who didn’t want his last name used) says, “When Dianna asked me what I thought, I told her to get out of the relationship. I always thought Todd was nice. I still think he’s nice. But she has a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old. You just don’t put them in that situation.” Dianna’s ex-husband had similar feelings. When she first told him why Todd was in prison, he exploded, saying, “I don’t want that piece of s—t around my kids!” He later calmed down, but he still thought that Dianna should leave Todd. “You deserve better than this,” he repeatedly told her.

A month later Dianna finally allowed Todd to see her daughters. Rachel ran up and gave him an enormous hug. He burst into tears. Dianna had a revelation: Todd was part of her family. She felt she had to give him a second chance, even though it wouldn’t be an easy choice to live with. Together they’d have to face the repercussions of the broadcast of the Dateline episode—and Todd’s trial, which would take place sometime early the next year.

That night when she told her girls, they were ecstatic. “I would have been mad if you left him,” Jessica told her. “I believe in him.” Rachel called Todd, exulting, “Mom says she’ll still marry you.”

On September 22, 2006, Todd’s episode of Dateline: To Catch a Predator aired. Dianna and Todd refused to watch it, but in living rooms across the country, 8.7 million viewers heard a voice-over say: “We’ve hired a young-looking 19-year-old named Amanda to play the part of an underage girl home alone. She gets into position, standing by the front door as a potential predator shows up at our undercover house.” The cameras show a man walking up to the front door. The voice-over continues: “Thirty-seven-year-old Todd West has no problem following our decoy right into the house. He’s here to meet a girl who online told him she was a 14-year-old virgin. He chatted with the decoy named mystyk_roses for a week.”

From there, things only get worse. A blurred image pops up on the screen: It’s a shot of Todd’s penis, which he sent the girl via webcam. At the Dateline house, Todd stands in the kitchen, pouring himself a glass of tea, while the decoy flutters around, asking him if he brought the Jack Daniel’s and condoms she’d requested. “Um-hmm,” he responds. The camera zooms in on Todd’s nervous, smiling face. “Do you have any special ideas for tonight or anything?” the decoy asks. “Not especially,” he says. She continues, “What are some of your ideas?” He laughs. “I don’t know,” he says. “You tell me.” That’s about as far as Todd gets. After cutting away to another man’s story, Dateline shows Todd outside the house as cops rush up to him, shouting that he should throw himself to the ground. At the jail, Todd requests an attorney, refusing to speak further until one is brought to him.

Dianna didn’t want to get out of bed the next day. Her phone rang endlessly. Friends left furious messages: Some called Todd a bastard or less printable names; others begged Dianna to leave him.

At Jessica’s school, people talked about the show—but none seemed to realize Todd’s relationship to her mother. In the hallway she heard teachers whisper about the episode, saying, “One of guys even had a fiancée! Can you believe it?” Jessica told her mother that evening at home: “I wanted to tell them how great Todd was.”

But in other ways, life remained eerily uneventful. “I kept expecting people to run up to us on the street—to yell at Todd. It never happened,” Dianna says. Even so, Dianna felt that Todd was falling apart. When they drove to the movies one evening, he pulled over to cry. “I was trying to live normally, but I had this incredibly depressed person on my hands,” says Dianna. “The guilt was eating him alive.”

The couple sought counseling from retired Episcopal priest Father R. Dean Johnson and his wife, Anna Johnson, a therapist. Johnson told Dianna, “I don’t think this man has any natural propensity to be a child molester.”

That insight helped Dianna believe Todd’s story about thinking he’d been chatting with an older girl, and as his court date drew nearer, Todd’s mental state improved. His public defender was optimistic, saying that considering the types of sentences given to Dateline predators, Todd would probably serve a short jail stint. “As crazy as it sounds, our relationship felt stronger than ever,” says Dianna. Even Dianna’s ex-husband had changed his mind about Todd. “He knew that Todd had acted like an idiot,” says Dianna. “But he wasn’t a child molester.” So when Todd called her one day and asked if she wanted to get married on her lunch break that very afternoon, she said yes.

Dianna expected to feel more settled after their quiet elopement, but the opposite proved true. Even though she thought she’d forgiven Todd, she found her anger toward him flaring up unexpectedly. She couldn’t stop obsessing, not just over the repulsive details reported on the Dateline episode, but also about his intended infidelity. Every time they walked by a young girl, she glared at him to make sure he wasn’t ogling her. More than anything, she worried that her decision to stay with Todd could hurt her girls. She often wondered, Am I the example I want to be?

Three months later there was an additional blow. A grand jury issued a harsh indictment against Todd for his actions: criminal attempt to commit child molestation and criminal attempt to commit statutory rape. In hopes of a light sentence, Todd decided to plead guilty. Father Johnson and his wife testified on Todd’s behalf, but the judge wasn’t swayed. Sex crimes, said the judge, “are like a computer virus that’s out there lurking in cyberspace, at home, looking for young, innocent children.” He handed Todd two consecutive 10-year sentences. Because Todd had been arrested in Georgia, where penalties for these crimes tend to be severe, he was given one of the harsher sentences in Dateline history. The only bright spot: He could be eligible for parole within a year or two. As the couple left the courthouse, strangers approached Dianna, saying, “We’re praying for you.”

On the day before Valentine’s Day 2007, Todd went to prison.

Life as the wife of a convicted sex predator was relentlessly demoralizing. On her weekly two-hour drives to the prison, Dianna would be greeted by an increasingly fragile and withdrawn Todd. Those few friends who hadn’t pulled away from her seemed to scrutinize her too closely. “I could feel them feeling sorry for me,” she says.

Her comfort came from her relationship with the community of friends she and Todd had established via MySpace, most of whom didn’t know about Todd’s crime. Then that changed too. Two weeks after Todd went to jail, a Perverted Justice fan sent an e-mail to Todd’s online friends. “This [note] is to inform you that Todd West has been convicted of charges stemming from his arrest in the Dateline NBC/Perverted Justice sting operation…in which he solicited, for sexual purposes, someone he believed to be 14 years of age,” read the e-mail. “While it is never easy to accept that someone you know, even online, has been convicted of such a horrific crime, it is important that you, the general public, be made aware of this serious offense.” Included was a link to Perverted Justice’s website, which had posted Todd’s chat with the Dateline decoy. The site poked fun at Dianna. It said, “We’re not quite sure who is more deluded…Father [Johnson] or the fiancée. Because despite his attempt at ‘premarital jitters,’ the fiancée married him a month later anyway…. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.”

The site also posted a profile about Todd’s crime, with links to his e-mail address, IM names and phone number. Every night Dianna and her girls got nasty anonymous phone calls, the mildest of which called Todd a “sicko pervert.” Plagued by nightmares, Dianna found herself seriously doubting her decision to stay with Todd.

In her conflicted frame of mind, she began thinking ahead to the next year, when Todd could possibly be out on parole. If he was released as a convicted sex offender, he would have to adhere to a strict set of rules. Dianna didn’t remember all the specifics, but she knew that he couldn’t be around any books or movies that featured minors. She and the girls decided to do a walk-through of their apartment and make a list of all the things that would have to go when Todd came home. All movies, books and CDs with references to children were banned. The Addams Family was out. So were Aeon Flux, Borat and The Swiss Family Robinson. Jessica plucked from the bookshelf one of her favorites from the American Girl Library: The Care & Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls with a cover illustration of three young girls wrapped in bath sheets. “Great,” Rachel said. “Minors in towels.”

Months later Dianna and her daughters met with Bob Wadkins, Todd’s public defender, to discuss Todd’s probation restrictions in detail. Soon after they walked into the restaurant, Wadkins said, “You have children. Todd can’t live with you.” Dianna stared at him, tears blurring her vision. “Can’t we appeal?” she asked. “You can make a request to the superior court,” said Wadkins, “but there is no judge in Georgia who is going to let your husband live with your daughters.”

As the attorney enumerated the rest of the conditions of Todd’s probation—no personal photos of minors in the house, no alcohol—Dianna’s mind reeled. This was the happiness she was holding out for? A life where Todd could meet her daughters only in public and only if at least six unrelated adults were present?

Dianna confided her dilemma to Todd’s roommate. He grimaced. “I love the guy like a brother,” he said. “But if I were you, I’d leave him. It’s not that I think he was trying to actually have sex with a 14-year-old girl. But this whole mess has become more trouble than it’s worth.”

In October of this year, Dianna made up her mind to divorce Todd. The two had been married just a year. When she told her daughters of her choice, they were furious. “Rachel didn’t say a word to me for two weeks,” she says.

But eventually the girls forgave Dianna, though they remain angry at Todd’s sentence and upset about the way that Dateline tore apart their lives. “If they put this part—the part where the family has to clean up the mess—in the TV show, I don’t think the ratings would be nearly as high,” Dianna says.

To this day, Dianna believes Todd’s story. His arresting officer, Sheriff Mike Jolley, thinks she is deceiving herself: “I’ve arrested a lot of men like Todd, and I don’t believe it’s a first time for any of them. There are a lot of frogs who will not turn into princes.”

But Dianna is still not convinced that Todd is a sex predator. “I don’t believe he is the man that Dateline says he is,” she says. Her leaving him “is not about Todd being a bad man. It’s about me being a good mother.” She adds, “I abandoned my kids once when I was addicted to drugs, but I’ve made a promise to myself never to do that again. They are part of me, my absolute priority. It all comes down to family. This is me keeping that promise.”

Asra Q. Nomani is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam.